A Promotion Isn’t Owed To You

By Jeff Altman, The Big Game Hunter

Beginning with my experience as an executive recruiter, to now coaching people into successful roles and careers, one thing I have learned from the people I have worked with is that managers often do a very good job of stroking their employee’s ego and, thus, give them a sense of false security and expectations.

“I see you on the fast track.”

“I see you as my best person.”

“I’ll look out for you.”

There are many different ways that managers and leaders give people the false illusion that they are important to an organization and that they have a long-term career ahead of them. Thus, they can be surprised to learn that their job security is a little bit more complicated than what their manager thinks and tells them.

I worked with someone a few years ago who was consistently told that his work was exceptional, his future guaranteed and that everyone thought the world of him. Suffice it to say, when the deck got shuffled and he was assigned to a new role, he was shocked to discover he had been sent to corporate Siberia into a position where his career in the organization was dead on arrival. All those kind words, all the superlatives, meant nothing.